Archipelago artwork

Archipelago

21 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 year ago - ★★★★★ - 7 ratings

An English-language podcast about arts, culture, and ideas in Denmark — Scandinavia's smallest (mostly) island nation.

Places & Travel Society & Culture Arts Performing Arts danish denmark copenhagen scandinavia scandinavian nordic culture travel arts ideas
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Episodes

This Amarkaner Life: Marianne's Swords

December 30, 2022 11:00 - 16 minutes - 11.6 MB

“Opening Champagne with a sword is more fun. You can feel it in your stomach.” So says Marianne Sass Petersen — a bookkeeper from Amager whose life changed when she attended a Champagne sabering competition at Tivoli. Dedicating herself to the art of opening Champagne bottles with swords, she went on to win the Danish championship — and launch a successful business teaching sabering. In the final episode of the season, we visit Marianne's house in Amager to find out why she loves sabering...

This Amarkaner Life: Mad About Amager

December 20, 2022 08:00 - 16 minutes - 11.6 MB

In episode five, we meet the chef trying to put Amager on the culinary map — quite literally. Yngve Fobian is the head chef at Øens Spisested — a "local" restaurant in more ways than one. For one thing, most of its ingredients are from Amager — a haul celebrated on a map in the dining room. Fish come from the icy waters of the Øresund, vegetables from fields near Dragør, game from the island's forests, and fruits and flowers from its commons. Yngve also gives free meals to locals who sha...

This Amarkaner Life: The Cold Shock

December 16, 2022 11:00 - 20 minutes - 14.3 MB

The Helgoland sea-bathing club, at the northern tip of Amager's beach, is home to one of the world's oldest winter-bathing associations, Det Kolde Gys ("The Cold Shock"). In episode four of This Amarkaner Life, we brave the heat of the sauna and the icy waters of the Øresund to talk to some of the association's hardiest members. We meet a woman who's been winter bathing for 30 years and a local physio who swims in the sea every morning and is one of the club's saunagus "masters". They rev...

This Amarkaner Life: Bee Curious

November 30, 2022 09:00 - 19 minutes - 13.1 MB

There's already a bit of a buzz around this episode — if only because the Amarkaners in question are the island’s hard-working honeybees. In episode three, we visit Bybi — a bee-powered project based in Amager’s historic Sundholm district — to meet its British founder, Oliver Maxwell. We learn about Bybi's unusual origin story and location, discover why Oliver prefers to see honey as an "invitation" not a product, and hear about the honey that has some of Copenhagen's best chefs "falling o...

This Amarkaner Life: Plane Speaking

October 24, 2022 08:00 - 19 minutes - 13.7 MB

Please return your seatbacks and tray tables to their fully upright position because we'll shortly be landing at one of Amager’s best-known restaurants — Flyvergrillen. You'll find it at Copenhagen airport, but don’t go looking for it before your next flight. Because Flyvergrillen isn’t so much at the airport as right alongside it. Indeed, the only thing separating it from the runway is a barbed-wire fence and about 100 metres of tarmac — giving diners a prime view of planes taking off or la...

This Amarkaner Life: Kurt's Ferrets

October 04, 2022 08:00 - 14 minutes - 10.1 MB

"Amager is a great place. Amager is number one.” So says Kurt Helmann Jensen ("Kurt like Kurt Russell"). And he should know. For one thing, he's a self-proclaimed "Amarkaner" — a dyed-in-the-wool resident of Amager, the much-maligned, teardrop-shaped island in southern Copenhagen. He's also the chairman of the association that runs Dyrenes Mindegrave, a cemetery on the island where bereaved pet owners — including Kurt — have come to lay their furry friends to rest for the past 75 years. ...

Introducing... The Recipe

October 29, 2021 07:00 - 2 minutes - 1.6 MB

Say hello to a brand-new food podcast. It’s called The Recipe — and it's all about the new generation of restaurants and the people behind them. If you heard the Mad World episode of Archipelago, in which we took a look at the Copenhagen restaurant scene, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what The Recipe will be like. We’ll be exploring what it takes to run a successful restaurant — and taking a closer look at some of the ingredients. Along the way, we’ll be meeting the food world’s most...

Stories Behind Bars

April 16, 2020 06:00 - 19 minutes - 13.5 MB

Danish "song kindergartens" hit the right notes, while a 19th-century prison provides an unsettling location for an overnight stay. In this episode, we visit Trekroner Børnehus, a kindergarten outside Roskilde, to hear about Sangglad — a scheme to "increase and improve" singing in Danish pre-schools. Then we head to Horsens Prison Museum, in Jutland, to discover how a notorious jail has been transformed into a popular tourist attraction. Further reading: Sangglad Horsens Prison Museum ...

School Bells, Church Bells, Alarm Bells for the Planet

March 27, 2020 10:00 - 22 minutes - 15.3 MB

Two Danish institutions have discovered eye-catching ways to go green. From Greta Thunberg’s school strike to the Fridays for the Future movement, there’s no shortage of children taking a stand against climate change. But while their activism takes place outside the school gates, some say that what kids are taught while they’re at school is just as important — if not more so. In this episode, we visit the Green Free School, in Amager, and talk to co-founder Phie Ambo about how the school ...

Right-On Green

March 27, 2020 10:00 - 22 minutes - 15.3 MB

Two Danish institutions have discovered eye-catching ways to go green. From Greta Thunberg’s school strike to the Fridays for the Future movement, there’s no shortage of children taking a stand against climate change. But while their activism takes place outside the school gates, some say that what kids are taught while they’re at school is just as important — if not more so. In this episode, we visit the Green Free School, in Amager, and talk to co-founder Phie Ambo about how the school ...

The Light Fantastic

December 20, 2019 11:00 - 27 minutes - 18.9 MB

In the bleak midwinter, the sun scarcely seems to rise in Denmark at all. Is it any wonder, then, that the Danes are so obsessed with good lighting? That Denmark has produced many of the world’s most iconic lights? That Danes have the world’s highest consumption of candles? Or that light is fundamental to the country’s best known cultural phenomenon, hygge? In (hopefully) the most illuminating episode of Archipelago yet, we discuss the light fantastic with three Danish design devotees: art...

Blixen En Pointe

November 09, 2019 06:00 - 23 minutes - 16.1 MB

“Those who wish to relive their lives, never lived them in the first place.” The words of Karen Blixen — the acclaimed Danish writer whose life story is the basis of a brand-new ballet created exclusively for the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen. Blixen sketches the writer's life story from her childhood years in Denmark through her unhappy marriage to her half-cousin Bror Blixen, her years running a coffee plantation in Kenya—where she embarked on a doomed love affair with Denys Finch H...

Memory Palace

September 22, 2019 05:00 - 25 minutes - 17.8 MB

Meik Wiking is one of the world’s leading happiness experts. The founder of the Happiness Research Institute, he’s also the author of two New York Times bestsellers — The Little Book of Hygge and The Little Book of Lykke — which have been translated into more than 35 languages and sold over a million copies worldwide. Little wonder, then, that he's been dubbed “probably the world’s happiest man”. But when Meik turned 40, he realised that, statistically speaking, as a Danish man, he’d live...

Pieces of Aidt

August 22, 2019 06:00 - 26 minutes - 18.1 MB

We kick off season two of Archipelago with a very special guest indeed. Naja Marie Aidt has been described as “one of the most intelligent writers of the contemporary literary world” and as “one of the compassionate voices in fiction”. Born in Greenland and raised in Copenhagen, she’s the author of ten poetry collections and three short-story collections — including Baboon, which won the Nordic countries’ most prestigious literary award, the Nordic Council's Literature Prize, as well as th...

The Porn Supremacy

June 20, 2019 07:00 - 44 minutes - 30.6 MB

We end season one with a bang — on the little known Danish island of Pornø.  To mark half a century since Denmark became the first country to legalise visual pornography, we take a deep dive into arty porn and pornographic art. Up first, we meet Rasmus Steenbakken, the curator of a major new group exhibition at the ARoS art museum in Aarhus which looks at cultural creativity, freedom of expression and art in the age of pornography. Then we talk to Anne Sofie Steen Sverdrup of Copenhagen-b...

Mad World

June 05, 2019 07:00 - 42 minutes - 19.6 MB

Once a foodie wasteland, Copenhagen is today a major gastronomic destination. It is, of course, the epicentre of New Nordic cuisine — the culinary movement that championed hyper-local, seasonal ingredients and elevated foraging and fermentation to art forms. But it’s also a global food city — one where savvy diners can find everything from Surinamese peanut soup to Ethiopian injera, Vietnamese banh mi to Cantonese dim sum. Even the local government has gone gourmet. There are honey bees o...

Chair Necessities

May 22, 2019 11:00 - 40 minutes - 18.7 MB

We try to solve one of the greatest mysteries of all time. Why are the Danish so crazy about chairs? Why are there so many Danish chairs? And does the world really need any more of them? Ahead of 3 Days of Design — Denmark’s biggest annual design event — we meet a trio of design devotees and discuss the past, present and future of Danish design. Up first is Christian Holmsted Olesen, the head of exhibitions and collections at the Danish Design Museum and the author of The Danish Chair: An...

Born To Be Wild

May 08, 2019 09:00 - 34 minutes - 15.8 MB

CPH:DOX is one of the world’s largest documentary film festivals — and a highlight of Copenhagen’s cultural calendar. In this episode we talk to the directors of two films that were screened in competition at the 2019 festival. Two very similar — and yet very different — documentaries about children growing up in Copenhagen today. Phie Ambo’s REDISCOVERY is a beautifully shot film about the 10 weeks that almost 50 children from the Green Free School in Amager spent building camps on an ove...

Booze and Bouquets

May 07, 2019 09:00 - 35 minutes - 16.1 MB

Episode two is about two Danish companies that have developed creative ways to employ people who often struggle to pick up work. First we meet People Like Us — a brewing company run by people who have been diagnosed with autism and social anxiety, and war veterans with PTSD. Then we meet Bike & Bloom, a florist that hires and trains people who are among the most invisible members of any society or labour market — refugee women. Further reading: People Like Us https://peoplelikeus.dk/ B...

You Say Yes, I Say No

May 01, 2019 16:00 - 40 minutes - 18.5 MB

Two very different takes on what our default response to life's opportunities ought to be.  Based on a pair of words that we all use every day. A pair of words with the power to change your life, alter the course of history, or simply stop you leaving the house. Those words, of course, are Yes and No. First we hear from Aalborg University psychology professor and bestselling author Svend Brinkmann about the importance of wearing "the No hat", the tyranny of positive thinking, and the "joy ...

Archipelago Trailer

April 27, 2019 10:00 - 28 seconds - 262 KB

A preview of the brand-new podcast about arts, culture and ideas in Denmark. Produced by Mothertongue Media. 

Books

Born to Be Wild
1 Episode